I started working with the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in late 2014, originally volunteering my time with a great team of people, designing and opening a museum pretty much from scratch with very little funding. In 2019, I started a channel our blog at Justseeds called Museum from Below, which I intended to function as an outlet for my own writing about the aspects of my practice as an artist that had begun evolving into my full time work as Creative Director at the museum. I had planned to use the blog to develop a more regular practice of writing about my work at the museum, both to broadcast it and to help myself metabolize what I was doing, but as with most of my creative work I have a lot of discipline and almost no regularity to speak of. The blog channel is currently a collage of announcements and essays and videos, and I only contribute a new post on occasion, but interest in the writing has been encouraging and I like to think it helps demystify the work of museums as well as the work of living as a working artist in a society that doesn’t really condone creative lives that aren’t market-driven.
This publication features two essays from the blog as well as the introduction I wrote in 2024 for Black Coal & Red Bandanas, an excellent graphic novel about the West Virginia Mine Wars by Raymond Tyler and Summer McClinton on PM Press.
100 printed, First Edition, January 2025
printed by Mary Tremonte on nice, heavy paper
with a Risograph EZ390 at Lavender Estero in Pittsburgh, PA
